Demonstrate
Demonstrate
Real World's Conditions, Real World's Materials
In order to demonstrate the work of our project in real world's conditions, we did not only use chemical test reagents (such as pNPB) to test our PETase activity. We instead tried to find the realest material that would be encountered by our bacteria on its applications. We ended up using plastic bottles directly as materials to be degraded.
The results of commonly found plastic bottle degradation by our bacteria are quite satisfactory. SEM analyses showed that our bacteria are able to degrade even real life plastic bottles, which are not pure PET. The effect is shown by SEM analyses where the plastic surface inoculated by our PETase-containing bacteria are rougher and has more cracks compared to its control.